LivingSocial Hacked; 50 Million Users Affected

The daily deals service LivingSocial has been hacked and will begin sending notifications out to users this afternoon.

Fifty million of the company’s 70 million users were affected.

Only users in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines are free of risk, since the company uses different storage systems in those countries.

“LivingSocial recently experienced a cyber-attack on our computer systems that resulted in unauthorized access to some customer data from our servers. We are actively working with law enforcement to investigate this issue,” CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy wrote in an internal memo obtained by AllThingsD.

The compromised information includes names, email addresses, encrypted passwords and, in some cases, date of birth. LivingSocial specified that it encrypts passwords by hashing and salting them.

The database that stores customer credit card information was not affected by the attack, the company said.

“We need to do the right thing for our customers who place their trust in us, and that is why we’re taking the steps described and going above and beyond what’s required. We’ll all need to work incredibly hard over the coming days and weeks to validate that faith and trust,” CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy wrote in the leaked memo.